In the interest of avoiding a flame war, I would like to clarify my comment. Please elaborate on what "war" is being waged. That's a strong statement. Jones is to me equivalent to those guys who wear the "got hates gays" signs and go to college campuses preaching inflammatory stuff, in other words, clowns.

This is a very good question, thank you. I am not very articulate in my ability to answer, but I'll give it a shot.

First I would say that it encompasses the fact that the purpose of propaganda, misinformation, and deception is not to inform but to incite, control, misdirect, and is otherwise malign in intent. The purpose of the action is to cause the recipient to self-harm, in the sense of sowing unwarranted distrust, fear, hatred, and division. The most fervent hope of those involved is that the US and the Western world devolve in to internal violence, disorganization, and dismemberment. I would add, these outcomes are very real risks as a result.

This is the major thrust of all of the most malignant social media operations, from Jones, to include wikileaks, the Russian astroturf and info theft campaigns, et. al.

The second aspect, not directly related to the speech aspect, is when political opponents are on the surface simply working the system but actually have no commitment to working within it and will only do so when obtaining their ends. For instance, the matter of the nomination of Garland to the US Supreme court was when it became clear that the party controlling congress was not actually committed to the norms and values of the institution, rather would do whatever they could get away with to achieve their ends. So also with voter disenfranchisement, making up lies about massive voter fraud, etc. These are all warfare, in that they are operating outside the value system that calls for free speech absolutism are assuming.

There is much to be learned from the likes of Arendt, Orwell, and others who studied the practices and effects of propaganda, disinformation, and related techniques. In my view all of these are outside the bounds of the social contract and are in fact warfare.

Interesting. Zooming out a bit I think you are making an argument similar to the argument entailed by the quote "war is politics with guns, and politics is war without guns".

The quote captures the violence inherent in politics. What is interesting about your argument is that you seem to carve out an exception for working within the system.

If we take "the system" to mean the dominant political order, or put another way, the manners and conventions preferred by those in power, then your comment seems to be a strong argument for preserving the status quo of powerful interests. This is nearly the definition of conservatism.

But you also mention that some try to attack our institutions. You include Wikileaks in that list, so I think there is an interesting distinction to be made.

Most of what Wikileaks does is to reveal corrupt or illegal behavior done by officials and government institutions. If the behavior that is revealed makes the public angry, then the leaked information puts the institutions involved in danger. The institutions generally exist because they provide a service to the public and the public funds the institutions in exchange for the service that is performed.

When leaked information shows that the service is not being performed in an honest way, the public may recoil and begin to question whether the institution should be trusted to continue functioning, since the leaked information reveals that there has been dishonest stewardship going on.

To use an analogy, take the situation with Jerry Sandusky. He ran the institution of Penn State football. Once someone leaked the information that he was abusing children with the help of some of his top staff members, the institution of Penn State football came under great scrutiny. In your words, it was "attacked" by those who were outraged that the legitimacy and history of the football program had been used to facilitate the inappropriate behavior of one man.

I view the leaked information and subsequent partial destruction of the Penn State football program as a very good thing. I'm actually very pleased that top aides to Sandusky were fired, and that Sandusky himself was no longer allowed to have a job where he could take advantage.

In the short term, this looks bad for the institution of Penn State football, but over time it offers the program a chance to rid itself of corruption and rebuild itself into a stronger institution that does not foster child abuse.

It sounds like you are arguing that there is a sacred area that it is impolite to question and impolite to "attack" if one comes to view it as being counter-productive. It seems that you believe that the people who leaked information that the US Government was lying to the public about the Iraq and Afghan wars should not have leaked the information but should instead have handled the situation internally within the military. Similarly one might expect that you would prefer that the person who leaked Sandusky's behavior should have instead gone to him and advised him to stop abusing children but should not have reported the abuse to authorities or the parents of the children he victimized.

While you may not hold these views, I think they may be logical consequences of the views you do express.

In my opinion, the only way we can have strong institutions is if we have high levels of accountability and zero wiggle room for fraud and corruption.

To draw on your point about information campaigns, I'm less concerned with the kinds of campaigns you mention and more concerned with the campaigns run by the most powerful interests. People in the US fear Muslims and brown folks largely because of a multi-billion dollar propaganda campaign intended to make Americans want wars in the middle east. There are unintended consequences to that campaign such as the fear and mistrust spilling over onto brown skinned immigrants from Latin America, etc.

There is very little scrutiny of key US institutions. The GSEs withheld financials for several years leading up to the crisis in 2008. Many officials have been found to have committed perjury, etc., yet have not been held accountable. There are so many disturbing ways in which the core institutions of our democratic system are being corrupted and used by those in power for their own benefit at the expense of society as a whole.

The solution is not trust in our leaders, good manners, or loyalty. The solution is to increase accountability and transparency. Someone like Jones should have no fodder for conspiracy theories because we should all see obviously corrupt leaders disgraced and removed fairly often.

How is it that we tolerate Paul Ryan, a man who has spent his life in public service and yet has a net worth exceeding $8 Million Dollars? Why don't we scrutinize how he got that money and what was exchanged for it?

When we allow this stuff to happen and we act loyal toward the people doing it, we empower people like Jones to embellish and stylize nearly any kind of conspiracy theory he dreams up. In a democracy, public servants do not become multi-millionaires. It just doesn't happen.

You have completely missed everything that I've said.

Wikileaks isn't about shedding light on corruption, as clearly indicated by Assange's activity during and after the 2016 campaign. His purpose and intent is to weaken the US and its ability to act as a united people for their own benefit. He's a happy Russian co-opt, a racist, a misogynist, and wants nothing more than to bring the US down for his own benefit.

Likewise all the other campaigns. It is a freshman error to believe the maskirovka, which is a plausible and agreeable statement of purpose or condition, and not see the underlying intent which is to do everything, anything, which reduces the ability of the people to unify and act in unity. Thus the funding and provocation of extremists on both left and right, ideology is irrelevant as long as division can be created and sown.

There is an enormous difference between the activities we are seeing, from Wikileaks, to Antifa, to the NRA, to Infowars,to Q, which are intended not to improve the US, but to destroy it, and some campaign which may be harmful to some in power but ultimately working within the social compact, for the benefit of others, and ultimately strengthening and unifying the people as a whole.

None of the above-named parties have the best interests of the US at heart. None of them. They are at war with the US, they are simply too weak to do so using overt violence. If they are a bit more successful we will see a shift in tactics, though, as we did in the 1970's, adding violence to the mix.

We should not be fools enough to let that happen.

OK I think I now understand your argument, but I have a few questions:

- Ignoring your unfair ad hominem aimed at Assange, you are making the broader point that many orgs can be "weaponized" in a way that creates division and tension. This is true.

- Is it your contention that the "activities we are seeing" are somehow part of a coordinated campaign? (antifa, NRA, Wikileaks, Infowars, Q).

- Or do you believe that each of these groups is independently seeking to harm the US by creating division?

- What would it mean to have the best interests of the US at heart? Over what time horizon is this defined? Which group of beneficiaries of such actions would be most aware of the benefits, which group least aware?

My view is that in a pluralistic society there are always countervailing interests. If I am selling a laptop I want to get a high price for it, the buyer wants to get a low price. We are strenuously opposed, yet if we transact we have reached an agreement.

In trade relationships, consensus takes place when a price is agreed on by two parties, but in governance, consensus is not so simple.

What does it mean to have consensus? The expression "the tyranny of the majority" illustrates the way in which the 51% may rule viciously over the 49%. Different political systems establish different consensus rules upon participants. Some democracies might require 100% consent by all citizens for anything to become law, others might require even less (such as plurality voting).

The NRA exists because the issue of gun ownership/rights lies close to the consensus margin... so do pro-life organizations. At least, pro-life organizations believe that the margin is close (I personally think that 80% or more oppose restricting reproductive freedom).

What happens when political action organizations wage campaigns that result in policy changes? By your definition I think you would say that something important is being destroyed. In the issue of reproductive freedom, depending on what side of the issue one is on, a change in laws would either be viewed as a great humanitarian tragedy or as a great humanitarian advancement... Or put another way, one side would view it as a great strengthening/improvement to the country, the other would view it as the destruction of something important.

So I'm trying to determine whether your view about those organizations trying to harm the US is based on the particulars of their views or of the tactics that they utilize to try to make political change.

I really do not understand how you could believe that in a democracy where people are free to vote for whichever candidate they prefer, how wikileaks revealing raw data from one of the candidates that would help voters come to understand the positions and opinions of the candidate better could possibly be viewed as anything other than a tremendous benefit to the democratic process.

In an election, one candidate has to win and another has to lose, and if voters are not supposed to use actual factual information to make the decision, what should they believe? Should they believe the TV commercials sponsored by the candidate? The lies told in speeches by the candidate?

To refer specifically to the Wikileaks emails from Clinton, I would strongly have preferred that someone also leak a bunch of Trump's emails, but I was personally very happy to see more details about what the candidate HRC actually believed in. It turned out she was both much more neoconservative than she had claimed, but also a bit more of a free-trade-idealizing libertarian. For me, this didn't really alter my view of her, some of the items were good news and others were bad news, and it all came out pretty much even.

So suppose that instead of Wikileaks the emails had been leaked to a major newspaper that did not publish all of them the way Wikileaks did but instead wrote individual stories highlighting the most newsworthy of the emails. Would this too have been an attack on the US? Why or why not?

In my view, we should all seek to be brothers in truth and the people should unite in solidarity against the elites who lie to us about wars and expect us to vote for them. Why do we accept their authority so readily? Why do people read newspapers of their chosen partisan slant and simply believe everything wholesale while disbelieving everything written in the opposing partisan newspaper?

In my view, it is the herd mentality and the high degree of loyalty that is the biggest threat to our freedom and our nation as a whole.